The Creative Arts Emmy Wins Worth Paying Attention To

This weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys will hand out more than half of the total number of Emmys, all in categories buried so deep on the ballot you’ve probably never seen anyone discussing them. But there are more than a few fascinating narratives to be found here. In order to prioritize your rooting interests, these are the 12 categories worth paying attention to.

Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics

Jackson McHenry and I already went deep on this category, which we both think will come down to Only Murders in the Building’s “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” versus Maya Rudolph’s Mother’s Day monologue from Saturday Night Live. It’s a Pasek & Paul EGOT versus Mother Maya, with Barbra Streisand on the sidelines!

Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy

Singling out the Guest Acting categories at the Creative Arts Emmys always feels like cheating (oooh, it’s all the actors whose names we know!), but there is just so much intrigue in this particular category. It pits the last two Best Supporting Actress Oscar winners against each other: Da’Vine Joy Randolph in Only Murders in the Building versus Jamie Lee Curtis on The Bear. Throw in another recent Oscar winner in Olivia Colman (also from The Bear) and SNL guest host Maya Rudolph (who is nominated in four categories this year), and you’ve got the kind of pedigree that’ll be hard to match even in the main Emmy telecast.

Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series

Okay, one more Guest category. This marks Claire Foy’s second time nominated for a guest appearance on The Crown after she vacated the role of Queen Elizabeth II after season two. She won this category in 2021, and considering her competition includes three actresses from Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Michaela Coel, Sarah Paulson, Parker Posey) who could all cancel each other out, plus Marcia Gay Harden’s single-scene appearance on The Morning Show, Claire could easily pull it off again.

Outstanding Narrator

A refreshingly succinct category name for such a prestigious award. The winner this year will succeed the man who has won the past two years in a row, one [checks notes] Barack Obama. It’s still a legends-only set of nominees this round, including Planet Earth III’s nature god David Attenborough, Queens narrator Angela Bassett, and Morgan dang Freeman taking a break from providing the voice of God to instead provide the voice-over for Netflix’s own Planet Earth ripoff Life on Our Planet.

Outstanding Host for a Reality Competition

This should be the final category presented, if only because it’s the category with the biggest implications for the following weekend’s Emmy telecast. RuPaul has won this award for the last eight years and is by far the winningest host in this category’s history. Yet Alan Cumming presents the biggest challenge to Ru’s winning streak yet. Will The Traitors host’s exaggerated Scottish accent and personalized flair for the dramatic be enough to notch the upset win? I am on pins and needles.

Outstanding Production Design for a Variety or Reality Series

There are five Production Design categories, all filled with worthy nominees like Fallout (in particular for designing all those Vaults), True Detective: Night Country (that abandoned research station!), and The Gilded Age (self-explanatory). But the reality category is notable for including one of only three nominations for Squid Game: The Challenge, perhaps the most undervalued reality series of the year, particularly as a production entity. The episode the show is nominated for included a life-size replica of the game Battleship, the kind of macro-level design that characterized the entire season.

Outstanding Casting for a Reality Program

This is another category we dived deep into a few weeks ago, with ​​Erin Tomasello, who won an Emmy for her work on The Traitors’ first season, repeatedly professing her admiration for the casting on Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum. Whether that show can best a Drag Race season that delivered on Nymphia Wind and Plane Jane remains to be seen.

Outstanding Choreography for Variety or Reality Programming

Look, it was enough of an injustice when the Oscar voters awarded the Billie Eilish Barbie snoozer song over “I’m Just Ken” mere moments after the latter was performed as a production spectacular complete with choreographed dancing and Slash from Guns N’ Roses. The very least the Emmys can do is award choreographer Mandy Moore (the one from So You Think You Can Dance, not the one from This Is Us) for her spectacular work on it.

Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score) AND Outstanding Main Title Theme Music

Composer Atticus Ross is nominated in both of these categories for his work on Shōgun; if he wins either, he’ll pick up the “E” in his EGOT. He’s got two Oscars (for The Social Network and Soul) and two Grammys (for the soundtrack albums for The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and Soul). Get this man to Broadway!

Outstanding Stunt Performance

Two things that are great about this category: (1) Stunts! We love stunts, and we especially love an awards show that gives out (multiple!) awards for stunts, and (2) This particular category honors not the stunt coordination (there are two other categories for that) but the stunt performers themselves. The shows include Shōgun (Hiroo Minami, Nobuyuki Obikane, Martin Cochingco, and Johnson Phan); Fallout (Justice Hedenberg, Hannah Scott, Adam Shippey, and Noelle Mulligan); The Righteous Gemstones (Ryan Disharoon, Mike Endoso, Jett Jansen Fernandez, and Rich King); The Continental (Jay Hawkins, Jerry Quill, and Ivy Haralson); and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, where the sole nominee is Tara Macken. This might be the only time you’ll see me rooting for The Continental. I’m gonna savor that.

Outstanding Writing for a Nonfiction Program

Some of the writing awards will be handed out on the main telecast, but not this one, which honors travelogues like Conan O’Brien Must Go and The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy and documentaries like Jim Henson Idea Man and The Jinx — Part 2. The most interesting, and the one I hope will win, is the episode of Max’s How to With John Wilson titled “How to Watch the Game,” where the titular host tries to get into watching sports ( by attending a tailgate party for the Buffalo Bills, with all the table-diving and condiment-drenching that entails) and ends up reflecting on the humanity of people who collect old vacuum cleaners. A tremendous episode of television that deserves a trophy.

Outstanding Commercial

One fun thing about following awards is that the tendencies of voters often remain constant no matter what kinds of things they’re voting on. In this case, Emmy electors will have to weigh their inclination to reward star power — as in the Uber One commercial/short film where Asa Butterfield befriends Robert De Niro, or the State Farm commercial where Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t say the phrase “like a good neighbor” correctly or the ad where Michael Cera pretends he’s the namesake for skin lotion CeraVe — versus the deep sentimentality of Apple’s George Harrison-scored animated holiday tale. (It’s actually called “Fuzzy Feelings”!) Then there’s the kind of voter who tries to award the most important subject matter, in which case watch out for the ad for gun violence-prevention organization Sandy Hook Promise, which gathers a bunch of comedians like Billy Eichner, Wanda Sykes, and Margaret Cho to read excerpts from school-shooter social media posts to make the point that we shouldn’t assume threats like that are jokes. Folks, it is a WILD ride. And in a few short days, it could be an Emmy winner!